PUBLISHING

The most well-known of these is UbuWeb, 25 a website offering an encyclopedic
scope of downloadable audio, video and plain-text versions of avant-garde
art recordings, films and books. Most of the books fall in the category of
small-edition artists’ books and are presented here with the permission of the
artists in question, who are not so concerned with potential loss of revenue
since most of the works are officially out of print and never made any money
even when they were commercially available.
All these websites are operated much like small specialized bookstores –
even though they don’t sell anything. However they demonstrate the viability
of an approach which is the complete opposite of that of mainstream businesses
such as Amazon and bookfi.org – namely, offering a relatively small
collection of personally selected publications. If the website enjoys a strong
reputation, as in the case of UbuWeb, AAAAARG or Monoskop, users will
regularly return to the site, and download and read works by authors they
have never even heard of, simply based on the fact that the work is available
on a site they trust.
What online booksellers could learn from these websites:
∞∞
∞∞
Simplicity combined with encyclopedic scope. No other website
except Amazon makes it so easy to find and download electronic
books in any genre or language, from bestsellers to obscure out-ofprint
cult classics.
Simplicity of format. The sites provide mostly PDFs and EPUBs,
depending on the format the work was presented in.
ARTIST AND DESIGNER-RUN PROJECTS:
BADLANDS UNLIMITED, KYUR8, ARTISTSEBOOKS.ORG
In recent years there have been efforts to set up small presses and book
download stores focusing exclusively on artists’ and designers’ books: for
example the writer, artist and publisher James Bridle (who coined the term
‘new aesthetics’) created Artists’ eBooks, a website featuring freely download-
25 UbuWeb, http://www.ubu.com .
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